Approved: Micachu’s Boiler Room mix

So, last week’s Ninja Tune takeover of the London-based Boiler Room featured an unofficial set by the label’s Mica Levi, aka instrumentalist and producer Micachu. She wasn’t even billed to attend but, despite the short notice of her summons, proved more than a match for Ninja peers Bonobo, Dels and Lapalux, who also appeared at the live-streamed event.

Flaunting a technical scope as studied as it surely is instinctual, Levi ransacks a kitchen-sink-cacophony (ie everything but) of effects, arrangements and shiftless rhythmic flux to engineer her 30 minute mix. Never averse to a little reverb, she constructs much of the music to sound as if pressed through a mesh of low-res static (a signature staple of both her solo work, and that with one-time band The Shapes), and yet builds in moments of comparative clarity in the likes of ‘I’m Not Dancing’ – a collaboration with Tirzah – which sounds all sweetness and light as compared to the onomatopoeic swarm of Michachu singlet ‘Oscillator Snaz’.

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